< 1 min. read To download a file over HTTP connection, we normally use download.file command in R, for example: url = "http://vincentarelbundock.github.io/Rdatasets/csv/datasets/iris.csv" download.file(url, "iris.csv", quiet=TRUE) For HTTPS connections, download.file may give you some issues. In situations like this you can consider using the httr package to download files: library(httr) url <- "https://rawgit.com/yoke2/dsxref/master/iris.xlsx" GET(url, write_disk("iris.xlsx", overwrite=TRUE))